Born May 29th, 1946
Died January 29th, 2026
A serious man with a mischievous smile, Richard Gorman, who has died at the age of 79, was an artist who could perhaps be best described through his paintings. They have a playful discipline and are present yet enigmatic. Exuberant on the surface, they hold a greater part in reserve.
Gorman gave an insight into the workings of his mind when making a series of prints with Stoney Road Press in 2023. He spoke of the “ping-pong possibility” the medium gave him, describing how “images reflect and enrich each other”.
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He knew well that while representational art gives you recognisable images to lead the way, abstract art holds its rewards for those who are prepared to let form, line, colour and space give shape to feelings, tensions and the possibility of emotional understandings.
Born in Dublin on May 29th, 1946, Gorman initially studied business at Trinity College, meant as a prelude to entering the family motor business. A stint working in England was followed by a period of travel, after which, at the age of 30, he made the change and enrolled at the then Dún Laoghaire School of Art.
Moving to Paris after graduation, he worked with the lithographer Jacques de Champfleury. “You may be dealt cards in life, but you can re-deal them,” he once said.
“He was quite figurative in the beginning,” says Patrick Murphy, the former director of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, who opened Gorman’s first solo show, in 1983, at Project. “He was making sculptures, under Victorian bell jars. When he started painting it was much more expressionistic. Then he refined into the work we know now. He was an intense worker. That’s what makes his work so authentic.”
Dividing his year between homes in Dalkey and Milan, Gorman also made frequent visits to Japan, where he learned papermaking techniques, and to Paris and the south of France, all settings that enriched his work.
He spoke with wonder about Matisse’s Rosary Chapel, in Vence – and, as with Matisse, music and dancing come to mind when thinking of his works. An earlier work by Gorman, Untitled, from 1985, when he was still just on the edges of pure abstraction – it’s now in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art – seems to speak across time to Matisse with its central image of a red chair.
Perhaps best described as a gentleman, in all senses of the word, Gorman had a genuine delight in life’s finer things. They were sensibilities that prompted Hermès to commission him to design a series of scarves in 2015.
Such was the success of the collaboration that the French fashion house echoed the geometric shapes of his Squeeze series across its menswear collection. Gorman also created window displays for Hermès in Tokyo. He told the Gloss magazine that it was “a lovely way for a little of my work to reach an entirely different audience.”
Art was important to him, and he was important to the Irish art world. A member of the RHA and of Aosdána, he gave his 2023 exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery the name Living Through Paint(ing).
Parkinson’s disease changed something of the manner of Gorman’s painting in more recent years, but it did not stop him working. He spoke of his desire to leave himself “open to the possibility of surprise” through his work.
While he leaves his sisters, Pamela and Sheila, and his friends, including his long-time gallerists at Kerlin, saddened by his death, he also leaves a legacy of the possibilities of surprise and delight through the sheer and considered joy of his work.
